i hope they have slurpees in china.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

i've been meaning to update, as i feel i always am. however i have been trying my best to savor every last second of communism i can, seeing as that i only have seven days left in this crazy country they call china. it is an understatement in saying that i am not ready to leave. i've become so accustomed to the whole communist lifestyle :). i'm going to miss my daily routines more than anything. the homemade dumplings right out of west gate and the man who always helps us with our chinese. i'm going to miss the crazy asians at the silk market trying to overcharge me for trinkets i definitely do not need. i'm going to miss sitting in the basement lounge at 3:00 am in the morning with my chinese class doing everything but studying and ordering mcdonald's delivery, yes at 3:00 am in the morning. i'm not ready to go. most all i'm going to miss the great friends i seem to have made here. its going to be weird not seeing them every day, banging on their doors, raiding their food stashes, fighting with them etc. china has been one of the best experiences of my life and i am so thankful for the people i got to share it with.

so its been about a month, and nothing TOO exciting has happened. except for the fact that EVERYTHING here is exciting!!!!!! i can't believe how fast this semester has gone. i feel like the silk road trip was just yesterday. a few weeks ago a bunch of my friends and i went to go see harry potter 7 at midnight! which means we got to see it 12 hours before all you americans :) HAH! it was in english with chinese subtitles, it was great. i also spent my first thanksgiving away from my family! i'm not big on thanksgiving food, but its one of my favorite breaks because my whole family always gets together at my cousins' house in connecticut and its very relaxing. christmas is always lots of driving up and down the northeast and craziness, but thanksgiving is very laidback and fun. and my grandmother always makes the best stringbeans! so i was a little nervous spending a family holiday in a foreign country without my family, however i was able to spend it with my new family, and it was one of the best thanksgivings yet! sounds cheesy, but my friends here have become family. there was a thanksgiving banquet thrown for us at a hotel, food was decent, desert was yummy! and afterwards i spent the night at smugglers playing drinking games. it was very laid back, we reminisced about china memories and talked about what we missed about america. it was a great thanksgiving. i'm so thankful for all my friends here who made my thanksgiving away from home one of the best thanksgivings i've ever had. its crazy to think that was two weeks ago. it feels like forever.

my classes ended a week ago, except for chinese of course. i have chinese class right up until the day i leave! you may think gross, but i love my chinese class more than anything. i've never had more fun at 8:00 in the morning. 我要我的老师和我的同学！(i love my teacher and my classmates!) we have a blast. and my teacher is hysterical and jokes around with us, in chinese obviously. i never thought i'd admit it, but i'm really going to miss chinese class. ALOT! i have four final papers and a chinese final. not too bad. except for the fact that i'm the world's biggest procrastinator. so hopefully i'll be able to get some work done this weekend, fingers crossed. however i'm more interested in soaking in as much china as i can before i leave.

the past couple of weeks i've been doing some major touristy shopping and picking up souvenirs and gifts for the few lucky people at home who will be receiving them ;) we visited qianmien, the shopping center behind tiananmen. i got lots of fun chinesey stuff. we also visited wangfujing. aka bug street. they have touristy vendors selling souvenirs and they sell bugs, to eat! we saw fried scorpions, tarantulas, snakes, seahorses, starfish, and a bunch of other gross stuff. i ate a little baby scorpion and then a big black one. i don't know why i thought they would be good, but they weren't. they were crunchy and disgusting and gross. the other day mariana and i finally visited the olympic park. it was cool! we got to see it at night and during the day time, which was cool. but the coolest thing every was the water park! they created a water park inside the olympic water cube!! it was really cool. it was pretty small and they only had a few rides, but definitely worth it. how many people can say they went water parking in the olympic water cube? well, i know i can :)

this is my last full weekend in beijing, and so far so great. like usual. tonight will be my last saturday in china :( bahhhhhhh. i'm definitely not ready to go, but what better way to spend it than a beijing pub crawl?! and one that starts at 4:00?! whaaaaa wish me luck!!

Thursday, November 11, 2010

你好! I can’t believe it’s already november. this semester is going by faster than ever and i don't like it. midterms have come and gone, and luckily they weren't terrible at all. i was most nervous about my chinese midterm and i aced it! yaaayayaya! once midterms were over TBC graciously whisked us away to Guilin, in southern china, for a week of much needed vacation. we started off our journey by enduring a twenty-four hour train ride. yes, i wasted an entire day of my life on a train. luckily i was able to catch up on all the sleep i missed out on during midterms week and slept a good 15 hours on the sleeper train! the train ride was a lot less awful than expected. it was fun with our entire program in the same car. plus sleeper trains are definitely in my top three favorite new discoveries of china so i didn't mind it too much.

after the twenty four hour train ride, we arrived in guilin and boarded a bus and headed to yao hill. it was pretty stupid. tbc has quite the track record of taking us to see things that are completely unnecessary. i definitely could have gone through life without visiting this one. we literally took a ski lift up a hill walked around for abotu two seconds and took a toboggan ride down. i mean it was worth it for the toboggan, but if you're ever in guilin my advice is to skip the yao hill. afterwards we headed to our hotel for the night. since we spent halloween on a train we explored the nearby city and found a bunch of bars still celebrating halloween. i'd say we were successful in getting our halloween fix.

the next morning we boarded a bus and headed to a province called yangshou. this place was great. maybe it was so enjoyable because we stayed there for more than one night. but this city was a blast. upon arriving we found great food while waiting to take a li river "cruise" well tbc's version of a cruise. which can be more accurately described as motorized rafts. it was so pretty. i couldn't have picked out greater scenery. i still have yet to see the movie avatar, but this is where it was filmed apparently. after our river cruise, we headed back to the hotel to 吃晚饭 (eat dinner) and then some of us decided to go see a famous guilin water show. once again not worth it. i was expecting fantasia. i didn't get my fantasia. or like cool water spraying from everywhere. i was expecting something cool. it wasn't that cool. a show ON water may be a better way to describe it.

tbc gave us a few options to choose from depending on how we wanted to spend our next couple of days in yangshou. we could choose two activities from hiking & kayaking, biking & mud caves, or cooking & painting. since i have absolute no desire or talent to cook or paint i opted for the kayaking and mud caves. lets just say i made some pretty good choices. the first day about 15 of us hiked for two hours then kayaked for about two as well. it was great. it was very relaxing and peaceful and not to mention we had a great backdrop. ahhh it was so much fun even though my shoulders were sore the next day. after we got back to our hotel and a few of us rented mopeds and explored the city. it was so much fun, although i can't drive one and china moped-ers are very intimidating. that night we came across a bar recommended by kevin gainey - monkey jane's. where the monkey jane herself graced us with her presents. she is a lunatic. definition of crazy. she had a beer pong table, which is unheard of in china so least to say us tbc-ers were pretty satisfied.

the next day was biking and mudcaving. i was so excited. and i had every right to be. this was prolly my favorite day of the whole trip. i forgot how much fun bike riding was. about twelve of us hoped on bikes and rode for two hours along country roads it was so much fun, even though the country roads weren't exactly smooth or comfortable to ride on. after a two hour bike we arrived at moon hill and made an hour climb to the top. damon mariana and i ,of course us st. joe's kids being adventurous and fearless, decided we had to go further - to the top of the arch. we bypassed the sign that said do not enter and climbed mountainous terrain to reach the top of the arch. and it was worth it. it was such a beautiful view, you could see everything. we were higher than 50% of the mountains around us. unfortunately the china smog was more than evident, however it was worth it nonetheless. after our two hour hike, we ate lunch and made our way to the mud caves. we boarded a tiny row boat, hard hats on, and sailed into the caves. then we had to spelunk for about thirty minutes to get to the actually mud caves. it was slippery and muddy and half the time we were crawling on our hands and knees, but of course it was a blast. upon reaching the actual mud pit we got soaked in mud and had mud fights, obviously. we then again spelunked some more to try and find a clean watering hole, of course it was non existent. afterwards we took the rowboats back outta the cave and made our way toward civilization. we had a bit of a dilemma, two choices i guess you could say. 1. ride the two hour bike ride back home covered in mud or 2. jump in the most likely disease and germ infested "pool" in front of the mudcaves. naturally, i went for the disease infested pool. freezing, but not too bad. i guess i'll discover if i'm disease infested when i return to america. afterwards i took about a three hour hot shower and slept until forever. it was wonderful!

our last stop on our week long vacation was to longsheng, we stayed in a village called dazhai. it was a lot of fun. there was nothing around. just the yao village people, who naturally threw us a bonfire party. we hiked rice terraces ate "western" food, slept in spider-infested, freezing hotel rooms, and last but not least awoke to the sounds of a large pig being slaughtered. good day. having had enough of the homestay, we then checked into a hot springs resort where we relaxing and hung around the hot springs all day. it was a nice, relaxing way to spend our last day of vacation. the next day we boarded a plane and headed back to beijing.

this was the greatest vacation of a life time, a free week off from school, warm weather, fun activities, and amazing scenery. however i am never too upset to return to beijing. after awhile i begin to miss the homemade dumplings out of east gate or taking the 20 kuai taxi ride to sanlitun or even chinese class. its weird. but i'm beginning to think i'm in love. in love with a communist country. tough life i lead, i know.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

so i realize its been about a month since filled ya'll in on china. i've tried though i swear. i think i'm losing my funny, its depressing. well anyways here it goes. the first week of october was national holiday week. yayy once again for china and their crazy random holidays. my family came to visit, my momma, dad, aunt, and my youngest brother will! and they brought me american candy :). it was fun to have them around. they were in beijing only a couple of days and they got to see all the important stuff. unfortunately i decided to tag along with them. it was a bit repetitive considering i've seen all the historical beijing nonsense numerous times. but just my luck we got to see the great wall, i'm not sure i could have left china without going there. again. not only did we visit the great wall, but we spent two hours sitting in traffic trying to get there. prolly because all of china had the same idea. i am now a firm supporter of this whole one child policy they got going on. believe me, they need it. my fifth trip to the great wall was no different, and no more exciting than my other. except for the fact the wall decided to take my blackberry hostage. great wall of china - 2 casey - 0. least to say i think that will be the last time i will be visiting the so called "great" wall.

after hours of touristy nonsense my family went to xi'an and then shanghai, where i met them again. my flight got in a few hours before theirs so i met my friend chris for lunch - a bunch of tbc-er's went down to shanghai for the break. chris and i had lunch on the 91st floor of the building that houses the tallest bar in the entire world. needless to say i spent a little too much on lunch than i do around beijing. however it was worth it. it was amurican. and it was steak. yummm. after my family finally arrived, we did some explorin around shanghai and they seem to think that since i had been living in beijing almost two months i'd know my way around shanghai. no mom and dad, beijing and shanghai are not the same place nor are they even in the same vicinity. shanghai was fun, much more industrialized than beijing. lots of tall buildings, kinda like new york. it was also a lot more westernized. lots of western food restaurants and so many people speak english, which is unheard of in beijing. we got to visit the shanghai expo, which was really cool! my friends ross and chris came along with my family, which was great except my mom, ross, and chris just complained the whole time that they wanted to leave. while they were at the world expo. i pick winners. however after a couple days full of shanghai and family i was ready to head back to 对外经贸大学, UIBE. so on friday, i said my goodbyes to the family and took the shuttle to the airport. since whenever china has a holiday their students obviously must make it up by attending school on the weekend. crazy communists. my flight was set to take off at 8:00, having me arriving back in beijing around 10:30. however at around 7:50 they proceed to tell us our flight will be delayed at least an hour. okay no big deal. except for the fact that i sat at the shanghai pudong international airport until 12:00 in the morning. after they finally boarded us i decided it wasn't too bad, i'd get in around 2:00 finish my chinese homework, take a nap, and i'd be ready to go. false. they just decided to make us get on the plane at 12:00 and not to leave until 2:30. perfect. we finally take off, i try to finish up some work, but of course i pass out. and wake up at 3:45 in beijing. i get to school a little after 4 in the morning greeted by many of my classmates, who had all of national holiday break to do their homework, but decided not to. so a few of us proceeded to go to 24 hour noodle to get our work done. i finish my work and its time to shower and go to chinese. great. chinese class with no sleep, not the best idea i've ever had. i had six straight days of classes. it was awful. basically no sleep just work. mostly chinese nonsense. i hate national holiday week.

luckily after that awful week, i got to relax all weekend and had a fairly easy week this past week. however, midterms are next week. hopefully they won't be too awful, my chinese midterm doesn't even sound that bad! after next week, the rest of the semester should be a breeze. i'm also very excited because after midterms they take us on a trip to guilin! its in southern china, in guangxi province and we're going to be visiting hot springs, mud caves, rafting the li river, hiking, rock climbing, etc. so hopefully the thought of guilin will be able to get me through midterm week. i promise to try and update a bit more often and hopefully my funny will have bad it back into my system by the next time. unfortunately, these chinese are starting to rub off on me, i'm beginning to turn into a real asian.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

i hope everyone enjoyed their mid autumn festival vacation :), once again, i'm not sure why china celebrates autumn. it does not look like autumn. autumn is my favorite season, especially at st. joe's - everything is so pretty. here, not so much. the weather is finally getting autumn-like, which is nice. but leaves are still green sky is still smog, etc. however i shouldn't be complaining, considering i got outta three days of classes.

since we had a few days off we decided to do something different. my friend taylor's tutor invited her to go camping on the great wall for a night during the break. mariana and i agreed we'd join them. i like camping!, it sounded fun! we took a subway to a bus then we were picked up by our host family and driven to a tiny little farm village. it was the most adorable thing i've ever seen. this little farm was run by a family. it was tiny. prolly half the size of the property a normal american family owns. they had a tiny little garden where they grew vegetables, a small indoor kitchen, two bedroom-like rooms, and a guest room with three beds, a tv, and a couch. taylor's tutor, jessie, taylor, mariana and i stayed in the guest room. i loved it the second i got there it was so cute and simple! the four of us walked around the village exploring. even though there wasn't exactly much to explore. mostly houses, a restaurant or two and one hotel. after our walk we all took a nap while we were waiting for dinner. dinner was delicous!! it tasted so fresh. we had lots of veggies, which were all freshly picked from their garden. it was so yummy. it was a nice change to the normal greasy, fried beijing street food we're used to eating. ahhh delicious!! they served us wine, mooncakes, and the best tea! mmm it was great. the four of us hung around, played cards, learned chinese chess!, and watched some chinese tv. we went to bed early to prepare for our long journey along the great wall the next day.

damn you great wall of china. that is all i have to say. we were very close so with jessie as our leader we walked to the great wall of china, sounds like a piece of cake considering the many experiences i've had with this notorious wall. LIES. it in no way shape or form was a piece cake. it was a mountain. we legitimately climbed a mountain to get the great wall. i thought the great wall was bad, man was i in for a real treat. i know i am often known for exaggerating or making sarcastic comments; however in no way am i exaggerating or being sarcastic when i say we climbed a mountain. we kept going higher and higher and higher. the "path" we were walking was full with overgrown weeds and grass and also looked like it endured a rock avalanche a few days before. we went mountain climbing. it was brutal. thank gosh i have climbed the great wall before or else i don't think i would've been able to make it. however once we finally got there it was so worth it. this part of the great wall was beautiful. we seemed to have escaped the infamous beijing smog, it was a clear blue sky and we even saw a few clouds!! unlike the first great wall TBC took us to, the steps were even, it wasn't as steep. it was great. while walking the wall, taylor, mariana, and i kept saying how much better this part of the wall was. continuously. "why didn't TBC take us to this part of the wall?" "this wall is so much nicer and easier to climb than the other wall." etc. etc. we were having a blast, it was the perfect weather, we were singing, it was great. we decided not to risk an early death by climbing down the mountain so instead we took the cable car which was pretty, we got a nice aerial view of the wall. once we got off i turned to mariana and taylor once i had realized our slip up. "uh this is the same exact wall." they both responded wiht no no no its not, they all have vendors like this at the end. no way this is the same wall. we continued to walk then we all looked at each other and we knew it. after the continuous complaints we realized that TBC in fact had taken us to the very same wall. least to say we got a few good laughs.

after a long walk home and a delicious lunch we packed our things and began the journey back. awful. absolutely awful. we were stuck on a crowded bus for an hour, standing. and to say crowded is an understatement. it was packed. you could not move. people were on top of each other. never again, never, ever. especially since they don't believe in deodorant in beijing. it was pretty bad. fortunately, we survived in case anybody was worried.

even though we just finished the mid-autumn festival vacation, this morning after my chinese class marked my week-long national day week vacation, oh china and your wonderful holidays. we have a week off of school! it feels wonderful! i'm beginning to think i'll be experiencing vacation here more than i will classes, and i'm not complaining. i'm even more excited because my mom, dad, aunt, and will are coming to visit me!! they come in tomorrow night and we'll be hanging out in beijing for a couple days then their going to travel all around china. and during the end of the week i'll be meeting them in shanghai! i'm so excited. except for the part where i will be dragged to the great wall of china AGAIN. kill me now. so i hope all you americans enjoy you're week of school because i will be doing no work whatsoever :) seeeeeeee yaaaaaaaa

Sunday, September 26, 2010

get ready for the longest entry of your life. first of all if any of you are considering backpacking a significant part of the silk road within two weeks, i'm telling you now - don't do it. don't get me wrong i really did love it. but now i get to complain about it, but keep in mind i do realize it was the experience of a lifetime. :)

i was so excited to go on this trip when i got to china, now i never want to see another part of china again. we went to nine different cities - xi'an, lanzhou, xia'he, jiayuguan, dunhuang, hami, shanshan, turpan, and urumqi never staying more than a night in one place. least to say it was exhausting. we took overnight trains, planes, camels, buses and we stayed in yurts, villages, tents, and hotels. EXHAUSTING.

i literally felt like i was on this little excursion for about 2 months when in fact it had been about 3 and 1/2 days. we were on the move 24/7. most of that time was spent waiting. waiting for trains, luggage, people, tours, camels, etc.

the long awaited journey began in the city of xi'an, which is most famous for housing the terra cotta warriors. they in fact were prolly my favorite site of the trip. oddly enough i was extremely fascinated with something other than the real housewives of new jersey. its so crazy that some farmer just one day dug up a whole army of terra cotta warriors. i loved them. it was also in xi'an that i realized that the chinese add r's to english words. yes it is stereotypical, however i was unsure if it was actually true. luckily enough our tour guide was able to confirm this myth for me. she used words like pagoder (pagoda) buddhr (buddha) and phenomener (phenomena). least to say, she was great. another important discovery on the way to xi'an: sleeper trains. i think sleeper trains may make the list of my top 5 favorite things in the entire world. i love them. i think they are great. they're so fun. just like six little bunk beds in a little compartment, often our program took up a car or two so it was always fun to hang out with everyone and fall asleep to asian lullabyes. so wonderful.

also in xi'an, TBC (the beijing center - study abroad program i am going through) had decided to hire a few local students to take us around and show us the city for the night, and host a group of about 10 students at their house for dinner. sounds pretty cool and looks like TBC did their homework, right? false. our host student, joan, looked like she had been pulled of the street and forced to take a group of clueless, ignorant americans around. luckily her and her friend teamed up and took twenty of us around the city. after showing us some sites and forcing us to cross a major highway in the middle of oncoming traffic, it was time for dinner. my friend, mallory, took the initiative and asked how long far her house was from here. joan continued to tell us it was very, very far away. mallory continued to ask how we were getting to their house. joan looks at us with a confused look and says "whaaaa?" so joan and the other host student look at each other and ask "is this a prank." our group of TBC-er's looked at each other in confusion and quickly offered to go to a restaurant. job well done, TBC staff, job well done.

after xi'an we made our way to xia'he, which is a small tibetan village on the border between tibet and china. xia'he may have been my favorite place on the trip. we stayed in a town called labrong, which was literally a block long with a bunch of vendors, restaurants, weird stores, etc. however, they had the coolest jewelry and it was here that i had one of my favorite dishes in china! it was a bowl of soup with noodles and it was spicy and just delicious. the people here were great. i also tried yak! i know, i'm getting more and more adventurous everyday. on our last night in xia'he, a tibetan family threw us a great party. they served us great food and there was lots of singing and dancing. and alcohol. disgusting alcohol. they went into each of the rooms where TBC-ers were eating and started singing a beautiful song and then draping us with scarves. then they poured three shot glasses full of some tibetan liquor, most likely gasoline. they made us take three gasoline shots each and you couldn't say no because they were singing so beautifully. afterwards we serenaded them with don't stop believing. and yes, it was embarassing.

the next day we left xia'he for lanzhou to catch a train to jiayuguan. we visited a girls muslim school, which was really cool! all the girls were really sweet and they sang for us! we visited about a bajillion mosques, all were beautiful and all smell like yak butter. blehkk. we then made our way to jiayuguan where a few friends and i stumbled upon a carnival and treated ourselves to a few rounds of bumper cars. it was great.

after jiayuguan we arrived in dunhuang after a nauseous five hour drive through a place that most likely doesn't show up on google maps. there were no roads we just drove. people got sick which made the drive even more pleasant. however, it was worth it we spent the night in the gobi desert. thats right, how many people can say they've camped in the gobi desert? well i can. we set up two person tents and then spent the night climbing sand dunes. not the best idea when you can't shower for the next day. oh well it was prolly one of the coolest things i've ever done. we got up at 4 am the next morning to RIDE CAMELS. thats right, we rode camels through the gobi desert up to the tallest dune to watch the sunrise. it was awesome. i was so excited to ride a camel, but believe me they are not all that. they smell, they're uncomfortable, and i'm pretty sure mine had pink eye. i have spent two hours of my life on a camel, which for me is about an hour and 45 minutes too long. after making our way through loads of camel poop we got back on the bus and headed back to our hotel for much needed showers. also in dunhuang, we visited the mogao grottos which were actually really cool. they house a bunch of artifacts that are relevant to the silk road. they had buddhas there. i mean HUGE like 100 times my size. they were really cool.after dunhuang we made our way to hami for a bit then off to shanshan. in shanshan we stayed in a uygur village where we picked grapes, danced, and spent the night. the uygurs and the chinese don't have a very good relationship. they are an ethnic minority of china and not very accepted. they cooked us great food, provided us with endless amounts of grapes, and of course provided us with the ever-present dance party.

our last stop on the silk road was urumqi where we stayed at the heavenly lake. it was beautiful. it was a hike, but completely worth it. we stayed in kazak yurts - google 'em! - that were uncomfortable and cold. they cooked us lamb and when i say cooked i mean most likely killed the lamb that day and fed it to us. also when they brought out the lamb is was a legitimate lamb laid in front of us. it still looked like a lamb. yeah right was i eating that. of course there were some double dares involved and i ended up with lamb liver in my mouth, disgusting. however the normal lamb parts weren't that bad. except for the fact that 50% of our group spent the night puking. it was either the lamb, or the gross kfc we stopped at for lunch. i guess we'll never know. the next day we spent driving to the airport and hanging out a bazaar waiting for our flight. all we talked about was how excited we were to get back to beijing. and after a two hour flight we landed in our new home. it was glorious i never though i'd be happy to see the notorious beijing smog, but i was wrong i was ecstatic i prolly would've kissed the ground had i not jsut witnessed a small child drop his shorts and relieve himself just a few feet from me. oh beijing, how i missed you and your unique ways.

so i'm officially in love with you if you read that whole thing. and i hope it was able to persuade each and every one of you to cancel all ventures you had planned to travel the silk road. stay in america and save yourself the hardship.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

i figured i'd try and update the ole blog since i had a two day school week this week. its tuesday night and already the weekend! hooray for random chinese holidays. tomorrow marks china's mid-autumn festival where people celebrate the end of the summer harvest. its usually celebrated by indulging in mooncakes and watching the moon. however since the sky is a dusty sand color, i doubt that will be happening anytime soon. i don't know why the chinese even have a word for moon, i still have yet to see it. i will be celebrating the moon festival by camping on the great wall tomorrow night. please don't ask me how i got dragged into this seeing as i believe i have seen enough of the great wall to last me more than a lifetime.

unfortunately nothing too life changing has occurred recently. however my chinese medicine professor did inform us that the bar district we frequent every weekend is better known for picking up prostitutes and buying drugs. talk about my kinda scene. sadly more no asian pop star run-ins i think i blew that one.

i'm very excited because in 9 short days my family is coming to visit me in beijing for national holiday week! i'm so excited and i've been drafting my mom a list of stuff to bring to me which mostly consists of food and other things that are prolly illegal to bring into china. it got me thinking about the usa and how i do miss a few things. so i drafted a short list to remind me of all the stuff us ignorant americans take for granted, as well as some of the beautiful things about beijing.

happy mid-autumn festival, ya'll!

top 10 things i miss about the united states1. toliet paper in public bathrooms2. cars, bicycles, and police yielding to pedestrians3. clean air4. democracy 5. drinking tap water6. dogs peeing on sidewalks, opposed to small children.7. drying machines8. law and order svu marathons9. dunkin donuts/slurpees (they go hand in hand)10. st. joe’s ☺

top 10 things i love about beijing1. tipping is illegal2. the fourteen year old drinking age3. everything is so cheap! 4. the weird food5. chinese candy, well some of it.6. asian pop music everywhere7. playing charades while trying to order food8. asian babies everywhere9. mcdonald’s delivery 10. the Beijing subway

Sunday, September 12, 2010

so this past week was my first week of classes, which i have been long awaiting. i am excited to feel like i actually have a reason for being in beijing. making new friends and drinking too much are not good enough reasons to spend four months in country where they do not provide toilet paper in public bathrooms. my first class was chinese. i have chinese for 2 1/2 hours every day of the week except for wednesdays. i'm not quite sure when i thought that was a good idea. there is no english spoken in the class whatsoever, which is really great. least to say i am confused 24/7. that class is going to hands down kick my butt.

tuesday nights i have intro to buddhism, which is proving to be a pretty solid decision. the class is supposed to last three hours and my teacher took up less than one. and the last 10 minutes of class we practiced the lotus meditation position and meditated. he read our vibes told us he could tell that we were a really great group. he was being serious. i am also taking chinese medicine, which conveniently counts as a science credit at sju. my teacher is a hippie and the class was so boring she spoke a lot of the philosophical elements that drive chinese medicine, yawn. she also said she wouldn't be able to perform any practices on us because of liability issues, why do they think i'm taking this class anyway? i'm tryna get a free acupuncture session out of this. hopefully it will get more interesting as the semester goes on, keep your fingers crossed. i am also taking chinese ethics and asian values, mostly to teach me how to be more asian-like. i need to make more of an effort to learn the ways of my people and i feel this is a step in the right direction. it also doesn't hurt that i will be fulfilling my last philosophy requirement through this process.

my next class, chinese foreign policy, seems like a winner. our teacher is a big shot around china who is not a fan of the united states. he also looks exactly like a lego man, esp. when he wears hats. the spitting image of a lego man. google image "lego man" and you legitimately see my teacher. lego man proceeded to tell us that we would have no class for the next two weeks because he would be on "a semi-offical governmental mission" to Southeast Asia. he proceeded to tell us americans he was going to talk about how we suck and make awful decisions. however, lego man was able to teach me that the chinese really do not exercise the humor of sarcasm. they really don't. lego man told us he wanted to schedule a make up class since he would not be around. he proposed friday night. our whole class looked at each other and went silent. i thought this was great. my friend chris and i looked at each other trying not to laugh in his face. i turned to him and said, "yeah, definitely! count me in." sarcastically, of course. luckily, lego man overheard me and said yeah! you'd like to do that. my face went blank. he then proceeded to schedule a class for friday night. i think its safe to say i will not be making any friends in that class. however, lego man did promise me he would bring me a six pack. i love him already.

overall i would say i had a good first week of classes. however my fellow tbc-ers and i were ready for the weekend. we spent most of it in the bar district of sanlitun. we went to the street where there are lots of international bars. fortunately last night i was sober enough to commit myself to the beijing devils rugby team. perfect. look out kaitlyn vaughn. a group of girls from the united states, england, australia, new zealand, etc. apparently thought my friends and i looked like we'd be into playing rugby. well they apparently were right. my friend taylor, mariana and i are now expected at rugby practice thursday night. this however is going to coincide with the ladies night specials at bar blue. ladies night, which is free cocktails from 8-11 no cover charge, is a very important part of my weekly schedule. its going to be difficult to tear away from that. so if you don't hear from me for awhile it is definitely because i died at the beijing devil's rugby practice. somebody let my mom know it wasn't because i brush my teeth with the tap water. thanks.

About Me

considering the chinese don't believe in facebook, i figured this is the best way to keep in contact with my hundreds of thousands of friends, family, and fans who are curious as to what i will be up to for the next four months!